User:Fyddlestix/daycare

The Day-care abuse panic, sometimes referred to as the day care ritual abuse panic was a moral panic that occurred in the United States during the 1980s and early 1990s. During this period, hundreds of childcare workers and more than 100 day care centers were accused of horrific sexual abuse and satanic ritual abuse against children. Most of the charges were later found to have been baseless, and most of those convicted or charged were ultimately absolved,    though some cases - such as that of Frank Furster - whose case has sometimes been portrayed as an instance of the panic, but who was convicted and remains in prison - remain controversial.

The day care abuse panic was initiated by the McMartin preschool trial, in which a total of 369 children who attended a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were accused were identified as victims beginning in 1983. Media coverage of the McMartin case and similar cases was highly sensationalistic, and an "epidemic" of similar cases developed rapidly during the 1980s. Distinct from other child sex abuse investigations, the investigations that resulted from this moral panic involved outlandish accusations - such as allegations that teachers had thrown children into a tank full of sharks, forced them to watch the torture and dismemberment of animals, taken them to a graveyard to dig up bodies, or forced them to participate in elaborate religious ceremonies. Physical evidence that substantiated these accusations was almost never found, and prosecutions relied almost entirely on children's testimony.

Over time, skepticism of the claims being made in these cases mounted, and deepened after the accused in the McMartin trial were acquitted in 1990. By then, sociologists and psychologists were raising "serious doubts" about the validity of the allegations and investigative techniques made in these cases. Ultimately, most of these cases collapsed, and most of the care providers who had been convicted were later released.

While some scholars continued to treat the subject of "ritual abuse" as genuine into the 1990s, the panic had largely subsided by 1995, and an extensive body of scholarly research has since found that suggestive interviewing techniques had induced children to make false reports in most of the day-care abuse panic cases. Social scientists now generally agree that although sexual abuse of children is a real and pressing social problem, the allegations made in 1980s daycare cases were "mainly or entirely false," and a product of suggestive interviewing techniques and social anxiety about satanism and child protection rather than of actual child abuse. According to Debbie Nathan and Mike Snedeker, "the children had been eminently reliable" at the outset of these cases, but reported not having been abused when first questioned. In most cases, it was only after "intense and relentless insistence" and repeated questioning by concerned adults that children alleged abuse, with the result that their testimony amounted to "juvenile renderings of grownups' anxieties," and "adult projections and fantasies."

According to sociologist Mary de Young, the period between the start of the McMartin preschool case in 1983 and the acquittal of the accused in 1990 was "a moral panic... that targeted a hundred or so day care centers in large cities and small towns across the United States." De Young's book The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic identifies and studies 22 separate cases in depth, and suggests that they all share common elements, and developed in a similar pattern.

According to psychologists James M. Wood, Debbie Nathan, M. Teresa Nezworski, and Elizabeth Uhl, The moral panic cases of the 1980s are atypical, and distinct from routine sexual abuse cases handled by law enforcement and child protective services (CPS) authorities today, in that the cases of the 1980s were characterized by "epidemics of false allegations by children," whereas "the large majority of sexual abuse allegations made by children to police and CPS today are probably true and reliable."